Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

C'mon, any modern machine can build a full Gentoo system in a few hours and updating/maintaining it doesn't cost that much time and you can cherrypick the updates you want. Try to install Gnome on Debian or Ubuntu and you'll get Dia or even gnome-bluetooth with all the bluez stack.

I don't want a "modern" machine, I don't want to have to recompile anything. I want to actually use the computer to do things, FAST! and securely, but not system administration. I want the computer to make my life easier, not the opposite. GNU/Linux and Windows both FAIL at this (I don't like to say Linux, because the kernel itself is really good, but the userland is junk).

If you want things done FAST, your choice would be something like DOS.

It has no desktop, consists of just a few kB of files, starts up in a few seconds and gets out of the way whenever you start an application, so the application itself is as fast as it can possibly be on that hardware.

If you want somehow more FEATURES from your operating system, you will have to agree to some compromise regarding FAST.
Finding the balance between FEATURES and FAST that is right for you is your task. No KDE, Gnome or XFCE developer can help you there.

A friend of mine did exactly that. He compiled a kernel with all his hardware drivers not being modules but compiled statically into the kernel. He was even able to switch off module support on his kernel which makes the thing slightly more secure. This gave him startup times of 3 seconds (from bootloader to login), because he did not run through a whole bunch of init scripts.
There was no automounting or other automagical stuff working on his machine. He then also compiled only the things he needed himself. It was completely self built from scratch. Beautiful, but lots of work.